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Cyber Resilience vs. Cybersecurity: What’s the Difference and How to Build a Plan for Both

cyber security

The strategies and practices for protecting electronic data are referred to as cybersecurity. This entails identifying data and its location, as well as putting in place technology and corporate policies to safeguard it.

Your company’s ability to withstand or swiftly recover from cyber disasters that impair normal business operations is known as cyber resilience.

To completely comprehend the distinction between these two notions, it is essential to first understand the two sorts of cyberattacks that an organization may face:

  • A data breach takes place when a hacker or a nation-state steals sensitive information.
  • Malicious action, such as ransomware or a denial-of-service assault, takes your organization offline or disrupts ordinary business activities.

While a cybersecurity strategy can help avoid data breaches and decrease the likelihood of malicious activity, a cyber resilience strategy focuses on mitigating the effects of such assaults — which is why your company needs both.

The measures below will assist you in integrating your cybersecurity and cyber resilience plans.

1. Make regular backups of your data

In the event of a cyberattack, backup is critical for data protection and can help speed up the restoration to regular operations. Consider the following scenario: A sophisticated ransomware attack has infected your network, encrypting all your data. The hackers demand ransom in exchange for the data being decrypted. You can easily restore any deleted data if you retain extensive and regular backups of your data on a separate network, providing you with a higher level of cyber resiliency.

2. Act out a security breach

Running through the actions your company will take in the case of a cybersecurity problem – from how you will escalate a potential security breach to alerting law enforcement, customers, and investors – helps boost everyone’s confidence and raise cyber resiliency.

3. Make the board aware of the importance of cybersecurity and cyber resilience

When everyone in your organization is on the same page regarding how prepared your organization is to fight a cyberattack and recover business operations after a successful attack, you accomplish successful cybersecurity protection and resilience. This includes the board of directors of your organization.

On the other hand, board members aren’t necessarily comfortable with the technical metrics and lingo that CISOs use in their reports and presentations. They require simply understandable measurements that shift the focus from cybersecurity and resiliency to business risk.

4. Establish a program of continuous improvement

Do not consider your cybersecurity and cyber resilience strategies to be one-shot deals. Strive to continuously learn from your risk remediation, mitigation, and recovery efforts.

You may employ a program to keep an eye on growing risk in your digital environment and that of your third-party partners. With this knowledge, you can immediately address vulnerabilities before they are exploited by a bad actor. 

You can also use programs to plan and track progress over time. Align investments and actions for your organization’s cybersecurity program where they will have the most significant demonstrable impact, as well as encourage data-driven cybersecurity conversations among key stakeholders.